Grand Theft

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The leaders of Nazi Germany were cultural philistines who counted themselves connoisseurs. Professing to admire art, they stole vast quantities of it. An extraordinary and clandestine collection of some 1,400 historic paintings looted by the Nazis was uncovered last year in Munich. That discovery has only just been made public by the authorities in Bavaria. They have an immense and perhaps impossible task in establishing the provenance of the paintings.

That is no excuse for dilatoriness, however. Nor can there be any reasonable dispute about to whom at least some of these works of art belong. They are the property